: How to increase reps on pullups/dips while doing a 2-day-split? I had to switch from Starting Strength to a 2-day-split because of recovery. The new routine is a push/pull split, done 4 times a week, which looks like this:

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Don't program dips and pull-ups like barbell or dumbbell presses, with a set number of reps. Instead, do a predetermined number of sets (e.g. 3 or 5 or 6) to failure. If that doesn't give you very many total reps, pick a target number of total reps (e.g. 50) and take as many sets as necessary to get there.

Use negatives if you have to, but I recommend nixing the bands too. Sometimes they help too much in the wrong portion of the exercise.

I'd also consider not putting dips after shoulder presses. They're very similar movements and picking one or the other would probably allow for better progress.

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Actually you can't do 2 things at the same time. You have to choose between strength and endurance you can't do both. Best thing you can do is to firstly get rid of the resistance band and start doing strict full ROM pull ups and dips.

When you get 12-15 reps at each you can start doing weighted dips and pull ups. That will increase your endurance as well. But not as much and fast as if you were doing specific endurance training

P.S You can try adding to your routine some scapula pulls its a great exercise and it's most of the times what is missing from taking your pulls ups to the next level.

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It is hard to increase reps on the pull-up. Some days you just seem to be going backwards as you cant even do as many as you did a couple of days ago!
This would indicate 'overtraining', perhaps leave them for a week and then go back and see if you can do more, this often is the case.

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When I work the Starting Strength program, I always include pullups. A few suggestions for increasing reps:

First, I would also suggest ditching the band. I find the bands helpful for working up to a single rep of a pullup variant, but after that I find that greasing the groove and speed variation are better for actually adding reps.

To move up from a single rep to say 2-3 reps, I find "greasing the groove" most helpful. Do your single rep, but do it a lot. 10+ times per day throughout the day for several days, after which it should be possible to do 2-3 reps.

To move up from 2-3 reps, the most useful thing that I've found is speed variation. When I was working on getting to ten pullups and I hit a plateau, I would start doing each individual pullup as slowly as I could. This would cause a drop in the number of reps per set, but after a few weeks of slow pullups, I would be able to come back and do more reps than I had before starting the slow pullup phase - and if I really wanted to feel awesome, I'd do slow pullups for a few weeks and then crack out a few sets of pullups as fast as I could.

I find that doing pullups twice per week is the best way to increase reps. When I tried to do them 5 days/week I didn't have enough time to recover, and had a very hard time increasing the number of reps.

Another suggestion would be to move the pullups to the front of the workout. When I was working Starting Strength, I always started off my workout with a set of pullups. It didn't seem to affect the other lifts negatively, but I found it very hard to progress in pullups if I did them after a set of heavy squats or deadlifts. I'd just be too drained to really hit them hard.

Good luck!